I rarely write about myself, who I am, or what I am doing in this world. As I visit blogs like Scott Monty, Seth Godin, Jeremiah Owyang, just to name the most recent ones, I realize it’s important to show aspects of myself to you, the reader.
First, I’m happy to be on Twitter, which seems to be the new instant messaging system for people who think too much and want to broadcast their thoughts so they have a place outside of their head. I am meeting some very cool and interesting people.
I work at a yoga studio two nights a week on work exchange. The tasks are not hard–wash towels, clean rented yoga mats and answer questions for people who are passing in. It’s like the Karate Kid and Mr. Miyage, except it’s yoga not karate…and no wax-on, wax-off type exercises here. I enjoy the yoga classes and the people are really cool. When it’s raining outside, it’s a good excuse to still exercise, not to mention all the positive effects of yoga and meditation.
While at the yoga studio, I did some journaling on my name as a personal branding exercise. I’ve had a number of strange nicknames at different stages of my life: Clara bear/Claire bear, Clarabelle, Clarolella (from an Italian friend)…one joker once asked if he could call me Santa due to my namesake (I was born in Santa Clara, CA).
I’ve played around a bit with the ideas of Status Quo to create the tagline: “The Clarity Standard.” The tagline doesn’t work so well for me, though, because as someone who’s lived 50% of her life outside of the US, this Europe-Asia-America lens on who I am gets lost in this message.
After all that doodling around in cursive as recommended by Catherine Kaputa (which I’ll scan in when I get to a scanner), I realized that brands are not created, but they simply exist. If each person has their own unique personality and traits, naturally, then a brand is a strategically tailored and highly visible extension of the individual.
The web has carved out niches for people to be personal brands of their own. Evidence of this is in sites that target those who want visibility like Squidoo and Visual CV.
Now that we are all working hard at personal branding and the next generation of workers are going to be really good at picking up all this technology, what is going to be the next competitive advantage for the few generations after them…and for us when we’re older? Will people all start being self-branders and will have to scramble on to the next thing?
